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Mystic Dave - A Beginning

With Pong and Asteroids under my belt is it time to get started on a new game, this one again about an order of magnitude more complicated than the last. I was initially considering sticking to the wiremesh world and make a retro Star Fox meets Geometry Wars (I'd call it "star wars" or something), but after a day or two decided I lacked interest and wanted to do something a little more fulfilling.

Mystic Dave is a game I had taken a stab at several years ago when working on games in Java. I never got very far and never properly planned out the entire game. This time things are different, and I am already well on my way down the game dev path.

Remember the original Legend of Zelda (LOZ)? You start off in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but escape from the enemies by hiding in a cave. Within you find a strange cave hermit who says "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." and gives you his sword before mysteriously vanishing.

Thus was the internet meme born

My game will start out very similarly to LOZ, only this time, after Link gets the sword, he leaves the room, everything shakes, and blood splatters violently from where he left. It is up the the hermit to save the day!

In a nutshell, Mystic Dave will be a 2D top-down puzzle game primarily drawing heavily in inspiration from the LOZ series. The core game play mechanic will be block pushing problems, with a twist. Mystic Dave has the ability to cast runes on certain items which can either bind them together physically (so pushing one moves the other), or conductively (so heating one heats the other), allowing far more complicated puzzles to be created and solved. As the game progresses the player is challenged with more and more complicated puzzles and gains more and more sophisticated abilities. The game will be written in C++ in MSVC and will use the Allegro 5 library. It will run on Windows.

It is my intention to maintain a development blog right here on Mystic Dave over the next months as I make the game. It will cover problems that I (hopefully) overcome, and keep everyone up to date on game dev progression. This is something new for me, but I feel that doing this will help me stay motivated and give me a neat record to look through after the fact.

During this development phase I will keep the latest build here. I intend to only put up stable builds, but there will absolutely be bugs from time to time. Feel free to post if you notice anything crazy.